With only a little prompting Floyd Norman remembers the period, over five decades ago, when he spent two-and-a-half years “fooling around with three little round grandmothers”.

Norman was one of the animators who worked on Sleeping Beauty. He’d been hired in 1956 to join the huge team toiling on the Disneyfilm. They’d already been at it for five years, and the end wasn’t even nearly in sight. Also not in sight: the huge toll that the film would exact on the Walt Disney Company. After Sleeping Beauty, it would be 30 years before Disney again attempted to animate a fairy tale, 1989’s The Little Mermaid.

Norman’s job was to bring to life the trio of fairies who protected the young princess – Briar Rose, or Aurora, as she was known before that catastrophic appointment with a spinning wheel spindle on her 16th birthday.

For the young artist, keen though he was to make his mark within Disney – the studio then at the height of its imperial Fifties powers – there was a frustration. A chap in Hollywood in his early Twenties didn’t want to be animating cuddly fairy folk, and certainly not for a good chunk of the latter half of the rock’n’roll decade. Nor, to be honest, was Norman much interested in Sleeping Beauty’s heroine and hero.

“Yeah, Briar Rose was pretty and attractive,” Norman, 78 now, recalls with a dismissive chuckle. “The three good fairies were sweet and adorable. Prince Philip was the standard handsome prince on horseback. But Maleficent,” he says with still-obvious relish, “she was the truly interesting character in the film”.

Maleficent was the evil fairy. Her name – which even Norman has trouble pronouncing – is a derivation of a Latin phrase that means “harmfully malicious”. But the guys tasked with bringing her to life almost 60 years ago knew there was more to her than that. She was sleek, elegant, and imperious. There was no banality of evil with this Disney villainess.

“Maleficent was very a compelling character,” Norman tells me as we sit in an office in Disney’s Los Angeles archive, the Animation Research Library. “We wanted to see more of her. In fact a lot of the artists wanted to work on her scenes. And everyone had questions about Maleficent. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why was she banished from the kingdom by the king and queen? Why wasn’t she invited to the christening? What grudge does she hold?

“Nobody cared much about the Prince or Aurora – oh, she’s a princess, big deal,” laughs this straight-talking Disney Legend (an official designation) who went on to work onThe Jungle Book and, years later, on Pixar’s Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. “It was Maleficent who was really the core of this film. And in a way it was a shame that we didn’t do more with her.”

Almost 60 years later, his wish is the Disney company’s command. Maleficent is a new live action film starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, with 16-year-old Elle Fanning (Super 8, Ginger & Rosa) as Aurora. It’s directed by Robert Stromberg, who won Oscars for Best Art Direction for Avatar and, the following year, Alice In Wonderland. As the suitably visually stunning CGI blockbuster’s tag-line has it: “Don’t believe the fairy tale.”

What, I ask Don Hahn, does that mean? “That there’s a lot more beneath at the surface,” replies Maleficent’s Executive Producer. “We’re digging deeper into the heart of this character, and [into] what makes her tick and makes her who she is. That’s what attracted us to her to begin with. What makes Maleficent one of the most beloved characters in the history of Disney, and makes kids dress up as Maleficent at Halloween? So,” he says brightly, “we made up the story of why, and hopefully the audience will respond to it!”

See the omnipresent marketing materials for Maleficent and it’s not hard to imagine that it’s a role Jolie was born to play (says Hahn: “we certainly never talked about anybody else in this role”). She’s a rhapsody in leather and horns, with an almost vampiric, blood-red smile and (prosthetic) cheekbones to die for. This devil doesn’t wear Prada, but she does wear brilliant couture-like costume. Jolie was so convincingly sinister in the role that the only child who could play the infant Aurora and not run screaming from the room was Vivienne, Jolie’s daughter with Brad Pitt.

“The original [Maleficent] was so well-drawn,” the actress tells me when we meet in a London hotel. Audley, she says appreciatively, “had such an extraordinary voice. And something about Maleficent just seemed so powerful and elegant. And she just seemed to enjoy being evil,” she adds, smiling. “Which I think is fun to watch. And I find it really interesting that people say she’s the worst Disney villain. We had a lot of discussions about that on set – why? There are so many great villains. But why is she voted by kids the scariest?

“We talked about [whether] maybe it’s a mother issue. [This is] the woman that’s supposed to make children feel safe, and then she does the worst thing – she curses a child. So is that it? Or is it that she seems completely free of any guilt?”

Jolie professes to still not know, even after a year researching the character and being front and centre in the huge production, filmed over five months at Pinewood Studios outside London. “But it’s been really fun to explore. And what was most interesting was that we didn’t realise that there was so much left out of the original animated feature – mainly the fact that she actually was a fairy.”

This explains this origins movie’s early scenes, which feature a winged Maleficent swooping over the forest she considers home and waging spell-flinging battle against the lumpen menfolk who come to try conquer the woods.

“So it wasn’t just reinventing her,” concludes Jolie. “It was actually going back to the original fairy tale and trying to figure out what was missed.”

Sleeping Beauty was released in 1959, but it began life at the Walt Disney Company around 1951. Story outlines from that year are of “a radically different story,” says Fox Carney. His job title is Manager, Research at the ARL, and as such he’s one of the great repositories of Disney lore. Those early drafts feature Aurora being kept prisoner in the castle by her royal parents, lest she travel outside and encounter a spinning wheel and thereby set in motion the curse bestowed at her christening by Maleficent.

An early version of the Sleeping Beauty villainess (DISNEY)

The evil fairy, too, was different. The ARL have uncredited early Fifties drawings of Maleficent – they depict a more traditional baddie, a warty crone with hook nose, raggedy cape and rather unsettling antennae. It’s hard to imagine Jolie playing that Maleficent.

“And in some early versions,” Carney continues, “Maleficent had a hench-bird – a sidekick that was a vulture, with a Bronx or Brooklyn accent. He would try and ingratiate himself with Briar Rose’s animal friends, so was better able to find out information about the princess for Maleficent. But,” he says with a wry smile, “it’s hard to imagine how they thought a New York accent would work in this 13th or 14th century story. So,” he nods, “a lot of iterations.”

Still, for the heritage-aware Disney, there’s gold in them there detours. The forthcoming “Diamond Edition” DVD reissue of Sleeping Beauty will include a deleted scene featuring The Vulture. And, as the company’s Home Entertainment team did, so Hahn’s filmmakers also used the ARL to dive into the DNA of Sleeping Beauty. The time-served Disney hand, who previously produced Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, readily identifies the “limitations” of the original story.

For one thing, modern audiences might be less than accepting of a yarn in which only a handsome nobleman bestowing “true love’s kiss” can save a helpless girl. Plus, “you have a pretty wooden prince, Aurora’s asleep through half the movie … So Maleficent really drives the story.”

The only child able to act alongside Jolie without screaming was her daughter, Vivienne

Hahn points out that, in fact, in the Medieval European fairy tales that introduced the story of Sleeping Beauty, “she sleeps for 100 years and wakes up to a prince who’s 100 years older, which is creepy – you have this beautiful young girl frozen in time and an old man going, [creaky voice] ‘remember me?’ So it’s a strange dynamic. And those are also problems Walt Disney had to deal with in the Fifties.”

They weren’t his only problems. Uncle Walt had embarked on Sleeping Beauty with a particular interest in the film: his directive to his animators was that it should be a “moving illustration”. That is, of the highest, painterly quality. One of his most gifted artists, Eyvind Earle, took up that challenge with relish. A background artist, he ended up designing the film’s entire look. His inspiration came from Pre-Renaissance art, Gothic paintings and Persian tapestries.

Marc Davis’s designs for Maleficent were also inspired by the Gothic tradition. He wanted to give her a demonic feel, so saw her robes as being primarily black and red, the better to evoke flames. But Earle said red would be too brilliant against his backgrounds, so Davis had to resort to a more muted tone of purple.

Floyd Norman sings the praises of the inventive Earle, who was “amazingly productive” and came up with “so many gorgeous backgrounds”. But at the same time, “he had complaints about his backgrounds, because they were somewhat intense. And the animators felt they were beginning to attract too much attention and becoming centre-stage. They felt the animation was what the audience should look at and the backgrounds should, well, be in the background.”

Another issue was Walt Disney’s exacting demands for “a remarkable achievement. This stellar film. So they were drawing and redrawing, doing things again and again and again. Now, one could say that was time wasted, or you could say that was time invested. But a lot of work was being done – but the picture wasn’t getting done.”

Complicating matters was the fact that securing face time with Walt Disney was increasingly difficult. The Fifties was a robustly expansionist period for the company, and the old man was increasingly focused on their television output and on their first theme park, Disneyland, which opened in 1955.

“They were sweating it,” acknowledges Hahn, who has recently completed a book on Disney’s Depression-era roots. “It took so long to make this movie because Walt was preoccupied with all those other things. So yeah, it was a real risk.”

Designs for Maleficent were inspired by the Gothic tradition

For guys like Norman, constantly having to go back to the drawing board, were there grumblings of dissent.

“Not so much within our ranks,” replies the veteran animator, “but certainly [between] Walt and his brother Roy. Roy was the guy watching the chequebook. And a lot of money had been spent and the picture was nowhere near complete. So I’m sure Roy was the first to grumble. And then once he complained, Walt came to his producers and directors and basically said: ‘we got to get this picture done.’ So it was Walt who turned up the heat: ‘OK, OK, you guys have been fooling around long enough, let’s get the film done.’”

“Walt had wanted to do something different from Cinderella and Snow White in terms of a fairy tale. He wanted to make this film in Super Technirama 70,” says Hahn of the then-cutting edge widescreen process. The first film made in the format, Sleeping Beauty was also rendered in Technicolor and bolstered by six-channel stereophonic sound. “He wanted to push the technique. But it was at great cost. It was a tough movie to make. You know, adapting Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet for the score – they really had high ambitions for it.

“And I think it cost, not only in terms of dollars, but just the toll it took on the studio.”

Sleeping Beauty was eventually released in 1959, four years after its predecessor, The Lady & The Tramp – an unprecedented gap between Disney pictures. The only film to do better at the boxoffice that year was Ben-Hur. But at a cost of some $6m, Sleeping Beauty made an initial loss of $3 million, and was dogged by bad reviews.

“It was expensive,” shrugs Hahn. “Too expensive in Walt’s eyes. The studio had grown to 1,200 people in the animation department; it took, six, seven years to make. They followed it up with 101 Dalmations, which was much less expensive.” Sleeping Beauty, he says, cast a shadow over the company.

“You talk to guys like Floyd who worked on it, and there were huge lay-offs afterwards. The costs were so high that they brought in the Xerox company to be able to Xerox artwork onto cells and get rid of people who could paint things, and just concentrate on that process.

“And there was also that question over whether movies were gonna still exist. Television was taking over – would people still want to go to the movies? So there was a lot of doubt around Sleeping Beauty.”

It was, reflects Floyd Norman, the end of an era. “It was the last movie that was that extensively handcrafted, where the film depended on hundreds of artists to make this film a reality. And I do mean literally hundreds of artists had to sit down at their drawing tables and make this film.

“Well, that was no longer economically feasible. By the time we rolled around to 1960, Roy said: ‘Walt, we got to find a way to make these films faster and cheaper.’”

In crude terms, it was in with photocopying and out with lots of artists and animators. As Norman recalls it, “Dalmations’ production time was less than half Sleeping Beauty’s, and I’m certain that the budget was less than half too.”

A series of original character sketches

But against the odds, standards were maintained, notably with 101 Dalmations (1961) and The Jungle Book (1967). And Sleeping Beauty claimed its place within the pantheon of Disney classics, eventually recouping its costs, and then some.

Some 50 years later, around 2006, Don Hahn was studying anew at the Disney canon. He was looking for stories or characters that could be reimagined into new films. He lit on two properties. One was Frankenweenie. It was a 1984 stop-motion short by a young creative called Tim Burton that featured a reanimated dog called Sparky; it was also an expensive failure which resulted in Burton being fired by Disney. The other was Maleficent.

“And I remember going to [Burton’s home in] Camden in London and showing him both of them. I held up a drawing of Sparky and a drawing of Maleficent and said: ‘let’s do these!’ And he said: ‘OK!’ It was that quick!”

Burton’s Alice colleague Stromberg duly took the reigns of Maleficent, and writer Linda Woolverton, who had also worked on Alice In Wonderland (and The Lion King), was drafted in. Says Hahn, “Linda is great with female protagonists and was able to flesh out the character of Maleficent.”

Elle Fanning was soon on board to play Aurora. The bright, smiley, pink-loving teenager is a natural fit.

“Sleeping Beauty was my favourite Disney movie!” she gushes to me in London. “And I’m not just saying that! It really was. When you’re little, five years old, and you’re looking at the princesses, you relate to the one that you look most like. So I felt I looked most like Sleeping Beauty.”

Still, her version of Aurora is a bit less, well, simpering. “In the original she’s definitely delicate – she doesn’t have as much depth as the one the we tried to create. My Aurora is a little stronger.”

But Maleficent is very much Jolie’s movie. It’s not so much Sleeping Beauty as Raging Beauty. Forget the Fifties gender stereotypes of the Disney original – might she even be an empowering role model for modern girls? “Um, maybe Elle would be more of a role model!” Jolie replies, laughing. “But there is actually something to [Maleficent] that I think people will relate to – little boys, little girls, adults. She wasn’t born evil, and she had a real strong sense of justice.

“But then she’s abused. And I think we’ve all had moments in our lives where something has turned us. Something has made our wall go up, or made us less trusting and more angry. And it’s what you do with that. And she makes the absolutely worst choice and she becomes vengeful and she takes it out on somebody who is completely innocent.

“And how she comes to terms with that is interesting,” affirms Jolie. “And … anybody, especially children that have [been] bullied or felt like outsiders or shamed of themselves, they will identify with her.”

Floyd Norman thinks the old man would have approved. “Good thing we had a leader like Walt Disney,” he reflects with a grin. The initial critical and commercial flop of Sleeping Beauty “didn’t seem to bother Walt one bit. Maybe Walt had been though so many failures that another one was no big deal.

“He didn’t dwell with the past; he didn’t even deal with the present that much. It was the future that was important to Walt Disney. He just said, ‘we’re doing Dalmations next. Sleeping Beauty, we did the best we could. They don’t like it, what can you do?’ So we just moved on.”

Maleficent is released on May 28; Sleeping Beauty is released on DVD and Blu-Ray on June 2